by Jean Strouse
Business was booming in New York’s markets and harbors. The Erie Canal, completed in 1825 to link the city by water to the Great Lakes, had increased the speed and reduced the cost of transport in both directions. By the time Junius arrived, Manhattan had become the major “money center” in the United States, handling 40 percent of the country’s foreign trade.
Speculation on Wall Street was wild, however, and the national financial weather dangerously “squally” in 1834. Railways, roads, bridges, and canals were opening up vast new markets in the West. Local land prices soared at the hint of a new railroad line; factories and towns were sprouting like weeds on the open plains. The United States had 329 banks in 1829, and more than twice that number by 1837. Most of them made loans almost as readily as they accepted deposits, with minimal security requirements: between 1829 and 1837 the amount on loan jumped from $137 million to $525 million. With no federal braking mechanisms after the crippling of the Second Bank, gambling and inflation surged out of control.
Junius had planned to start his married life in New York, but after eighteen months, prudence won out over ambition. Early in 1836 he accepted a partnership with the dry goods firm of Howe, Mather & Co. in Hartford, telling the Reverend Pierpont, “altho’ I may not realise a fortune as soon, yet it seems safer” than Wall Street. He put $10,000 into the business (probably borrowed from his father), and hoped to move it to New York “as soon as we feel a little stronger & have added to our capital.”
He finished up the last of his New York work and returned to Hartford early in March. Joseph had finally built his family a house, at No. 26 Asylum Street on Lord’s Hill just west of downtown.‡ At the beginning of May, Junius went to Boston, where the Reverend Samuel K. Lothrop married him to Juliet Pierpont at her father’s church. The couple took a ten-day honeymoon in Providence. Joseph wrote in his diary on May 11: “Junius came home with his new wife.” The new wife’s sister, mother, and grandmother came to stay with the Morgans that summer. By mid-August, Juliet was pregnant.
Joseph’s diary does not mention an impending grandchild. It lists Aetna losses, Junius’s business trips, a visit from the returned Reverend Pierpont, the purchase of a pew at Hartford’s Center (Congregational) Church, farming details, local deaths, and political news: Democrat Martin Van Buren ran against four Whigs in 1836 and won. At the beginning of March 1837 Andrew Jackson announced in his last address as President: “I leave this great people prosperous and happy.” Joseph was delighted to see him go: “This day Andrew Jackson retires to Hermitage. We ought to rejoice.”
Then on April 17, Joseph wrote: “Junius 1st child a son born 3 a.m.” Junius and the Reverend Pierpont had birthdays in April. The young couple chose not to make their firstborn a junior. They named him John Pierpont Morgan.
Three weeks later the bill for the 1830s’ expansion came due. Set off by a chain of events that included credit restrictions imposed by the Bank of England, domestic crop failures, an adverse trade balance, and a fall in the price of cotton, the panic of 1837 started in New York and was followed by one of the worst depressions in American history. The nineteenth century would see a new economic crisis every 10 to 20 years: in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1884, and 1893. According to John Kenneth Galbraith, the intervals between panics corresponded “roughly with the time it took people to forget the last disaster.”
Junius stayed in Hartford for two weeks after the birth of his son. In early May, as the financial crisis threatened Howe, Mather clients with default, he went south to collect on precarious debts. “Don’t give out!” Mather urged him. “Stick to them for good.” Junius’s mail from the firm that spring included cheerful news about his family: “Your wife & baby is fine & write today,” and “Your wife was at the store yesterday looked very smart & she said young Mr. Morgan was also doing nicely.”
The store was doing nicely as well, under the circumstances. “Our own affairs look better than when you left,” reported the partners on May 8, “& we feel confident we shall stem the tide.” The news from New York was “Bad. Bad – Bad.” In mid-May, New York’s banks stopped payment in specie—metal coin with a fixed value—and banks throughout New England followed suit. “We are after all in a devil of a stew without any basis to our currency,” Howe and Mather told Junius, instructing him to collect the southern debts in cotton or the notes of strong banks. By the time Junius came home in late June he had secured most of the money owed to the firm in the South.
Three generations of Morgans now lived under Joseph’s ample roof. Junius paid his father $9 a week in board for “Self & Family,” and there was a constant stream of guests. Juliet’s sister Mary came from Boston to help with the baby; Junius’s sister Lucy, who had married into Hartford’s prominent Goodwin family, often brought her children over for the day. The Morgans had a large staff of white and “coloured” help—farmhands, gardeners, cooks, serving girls, chambermaids. For Juliet, life as Mrs. Junius Morgan in this affluent Hartford household was radically different from the straitened circumstances of her life as Miss Pierpont in Boston.
She took her son to be baptized by her father at the Hollis Street Church in July 1837. The baby’s cumbersome name gave rise to several alternatives. Family letters and diaries refer to “Junius Child,” “Junius Boy,” “young Mr. Morgan,” and “Master J.P.” His parents nicknamed him “Bub.” Schoolmates later called him “Pip.” As soon as he was old enough to write, he signed himself “J. Pierpont Morgan,” and was known as Pierpont Morgan for the rest of his life.
Illness descended on his childhood with the unpredictable regularity of bad weather. Two months before his first birthday, in February 1838, “young Mr. Morgan” began having convulsions. Joseph wrote in his diary on the nineteenth: “Junius Child had a fit.” Early in March: “Junius Boy has had a sick week better to day no fits for several days Mary Pierpont came here from Boston.” And on March 24: “Junius Boy worse has many fits.”
Then Juliet came down with scarlet fever. When she took the baby with a nurse to see her parents at the end of April, Joseph noted: “Child very unwell I fear I never shall see him again.” Mother, son, and nurse stayed in Boston for six weeks, then moved to Guilford on the Connecticut shore to escape the city heat. Junius came from Hartford whenever he could get away. “Boy far from being well,” wrote Joseph in late July.
Next, Junius developed a fever that kept him in bed for two months. Late that fall the child’s convulsions finally stopped. “Master J.P. improves daily,” Junius told his father-in-law in November, and in December, “Bub very well & an astonishing boy.”
The specter of infant mortality haunted mid-nineteenth-century parents. Three of Lucy Goodwin’s children died before the age of three. Pierpont’s terrifying seizures left his parents extremely solicitous about his “delicate” health, and as he grew older, vague, unnamed maladies often kept him out of school. He retained a hypochondriacal sense of frailty all his life. Some mysterious affliction seemed to have him permanently in its grip, and he feared that if it disappeared in one form, it would come back in another.
“Whatever the nature of the [seizure] illness,” wrote his son-in-law in an unpublished recollection, “it left a strong impression of anxiety and concern on the family even after it appeared to have been entirely outgrown. This accounts for a sort of tradition about the facial infirmity that later appeared”—Morgan’s grotesque nose—“that it was another manifestation of the early trouble. It was believed that the growth could very easily have been removed. This was, in fact, the opinion of several eminent physicians. But a cure was never attempted. The supposed reason was that Mr. Morgan had an idea that if he should have the growth removed from his nose the other trouble might come back.”
The contrast between Morgans and Pierponts sharpened during the childhood of the boy with both names. The competent, close-knit, energetic Hartford relatives were exacting and somewhat stern. The Bostonians—feckless, impecunious, at odds with one another, plagued by physical and psychol
ogical troubles—were a mess; they were also, for a child, more fun.
The Morgan grandparents played an integral role in Pierpont’s daily life, serving in effect as a second set of parents. Junius and Juliet moved into a rented house in 1838, and when they went away for a month’s vacation in June of 1839 (Juliet was pregnant again), their two-year-old stayed with Joseph and Sarah on Asylum Street. Joseph, busy managing the construction of his wedding present to Junius—a house near his own on Lord’s Hill—wrote to the traveling pair that “your beautiful Dog breathed his last” and “Pierpont makes us no trouble, he behaves like a man.”
That Christmas, Juliet’s parents visited Hartford. Junius reported that for several days after their departure, “Bub” was “quite troubled because no plate was put upon the table for Mama P and Papa P – & he now often talks about them.” Mama and Papa P. had brought a new puppy for Christmas, and it was the boy’s “great favorite.”
One of the Reverend Pierpont’s admirers wrote that “he had not the limitations, either in character or thought, of the old Puritan mind,” but a “child-like character, one in which the direct sense of truth and right outran all other considerations.” Listening intently to the dictates of truth and right sometimes made Mr. Pierpont deaf to the world around him. Giving a lecture at Hartford’s Young Men’s Institute in 1838 on his travels in Constantinople, he described, among other things, the astonishing fertility of Ottoman women—one had married before the age of twelve and died at forty-seven, having given birth to twenty-seven children. The rural Connecticut River Valley subscribed to a more conservative Puritan orthodoxy than Boston did in the late 1830s, and Hartford’s nose was too blue for this sort of talk. Joseph reported the lecture “very long & not very well liked. Gave some displeasure to some of our very modest Ladies in speaking of the Fecundity of the Turkish ladies, etc …”
For all Mr. Pierpont’s zeal on behalf of truth and social justice, he had little empathy with the troubles in his own family. His wife’s father and brother were alcoholics, and when his own son William started down the same path, John Pierpont turned away in disgust. William died mysteriously in his late forties. His sister Mary told their father that “he was a thoroughly honest upright loving spirit … ‘Charity for others faults’ he had. Would, my Father, you had more of it.”
Mr. Pierpont’s second son, John, Jr., followed more closely in the paternal footsteps. After graduating from Harvard, he joined the Unitarian ministry, then took a preaching job in Savannah, Georgia. The elder John Pierpont worried about the younger’s ability to keep faith with abolitionist orthodoxy while in the South, to which his son replied, “My ideal of duty is not as high as yours.” In 1854 John, Jr., could speak fearlessly from the southern pulpit on any topic except slavery—the one topic on which his father would have wanted him to speak out: “Dear Father,” he tried to explain, “I am different from you in much. I look not upon life with your eyes.… But I trust that I am honest, even tho I am weak.”
The youngest son, James, had a penchant for trouble. He married at twenty-four, had two children, then headed off to the California gold rush leaving his father to look after his family. Failing to strike it rich, he tried and failed at several jobs. After his wife died in 1856, he deposited their children with her father and moved to Georgia to be near John, Jr., and their sister Caroline, who had married a southern businessman. James composed music, played the organ at John’s church, and far surpassed his brothers in the realm of Pierpont heresy by riding with the Confederate cavalry in the Civil War. He eventually outbid his father for literary immortality by writing a song called “Jingle Bells.”
John Pierpont’s sabbatical had not moderated his visionary fervor. In the fall of 1839, after he stepped up his attacks on slavery and “demon rum,” the Hollis Street proprietors censured him for “too busy interference with questions of legislation,” for lacking “discretion, moderation, charity and Christian meekness and humility,” and for his “unkind and excited manner of preaching.” They voted to fire him, 63 to 60.
Junius told his father-in-law that though “indignant” at the way the matter had been handled, he was glad it was over. It was not over. Mr. Pierpont refused to resign. Claiming that his adversaries had rigged the censure motion by having wealthy rum sellers buy up pews and cast more votes than they were entitled to—they had—he fought back for the freedom of the Unitarian pulpit in what became known locally as the Seven Years War. He demanded to hear the specific charges against him. When his accusers said he had entered into “every exciting topic that the ingenuity of the fanatic … could conjure up to distract & disturb the public mind, such as Imprisonment for Debt, the Militia Law, Anti-Masonry, Phrenology, Temperance, and … above all, the Abolition of Slavery,” Mr. Pierpont declared himself “Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!” Engaged in what he saw as a holy fight for the spiritual health of a nation threatened by economic materialism and the widespread worship of Mammon, he invoked Daniel Webster—“If the pulpit be silent … the pulpit is false to its trust”—and took his case before a Unitarian Ecclesiastical Council.
Popular sentiment throughout New England ran strongly in Mr. Pierpont’s favor, although Ralph Waldo Emerson held off: writing about the fracas to Theodore Parker, the Sage of Concord observed, “I think the people almost always right in their quarrels with their ministers, although they seldom know how to give the true reason of their discontent.”
Junius, trying to rein his father-in-law in, recommended a good lawyer and kept an eye on the proceedings. When he learned from a Hartford newspaper that Mr. Pierpont was considering running for Congress on the antislavery Liberty Party ticket early in 1842, Junius dispatched a lecture in which he either failed to see or chose to ignore the fact that the older man cared more for his moral rectitude than for his career: “I hope you have not given your assent to any such measure but will come forward at once & put a stop to it,” Junius ordered—“… if you allow such use of your name you lose at once all respect as a Christian minister, & it will be such an injury to you as can never be remedied.… I write for your sake not mine, & trust you will excuse, but I could not keep still.”
John Pierpont declined the nomination, but not because of Junius’s warnings: the loyalists at the Hollis Street Church wanted him to save his energies for his own fight. The case of the church proprietors versus John Pierpont turned into an “ecclesiastical circus,” with more testimony about book publishing, phrenology, and the price of courtesans in ancient Corinth than about slavery or temperance. When the Unitarian elders finally reached a verdict in 1845, ending the Seven Years War, they hedged—finding that the proprietors had insufficient grounds for dismissal, yet feeling called on to express “disapprobation of Mr. Pierpont’s conduct on some occasions.” The verdict amounted to exoneration with censure. Mr. Pierpont resigned from the Hollis Street Church in a rage, and accepted a Unitarian ministry in Troy, New York.
Joseph Morgan, approaching sixty, showed no signs of slowing down. Between April and August 1839, he recorded the progress on Junius’s wedding present: “Setting out Peach Trees on Junius Lot … Staked out the ground for Junius New House … raised Barn … digging cellar … began to lay cellar wall … raising Junius House.” Juliet had her baby—Sarah Spencer, named for her paternal grandmother—in December. Three months later the younger Morgans moved into 108 Farmington Road, a two-story wood building with dormer windows in a gambrel roof, a wide bay on the second floor, two chimneys, and views of downtown Hartford and the surrounding farms. Junius hired a gardener to take care of the grounds and a black woman named Mary Ann to help in the house. Joseph worked on the place all spring, putting up fences, grading the land, planting strawberries and more trees.
He remained loyal to Henry Clay, whom he visited on a trip to Kentucky in 1844 and supported as the Whig candidate for President that fall. Clay lost to James K. Polk—a southern slaveholding Democrat who promised to lower tariffs, annex Oregon and Texas, and oppose a national bank. On Marc
h 4, 1845, Joseph mourned: “James K. Polk of Tennessee takes the helm of Government to day. Dreadful.”
Junius agreed. In politics and business, he was following in his father’s footsteps. Howe, Mather & Co. continued to prosper, and when the depression finally ended in the mid-forties, Junius bought an additional $25,000 share in the firm with Joseph’s help. He also bought stock in banks, insurance companies, and railroads, and served on their boards. In religion, however, he chose a different path.
As the revolutionary struggle against England receded into the past, wealthy urban New Englanders in the middle of the nineteenth century gravitated to the Anglican Church. In part they were reacting against a revival of Puritan orthodoxy, the radical social activism of Unitarians and Transcendentalists, and fundamentalist extremes. The sumptuous architecture of Anglican churches and cathedrals, with vaulting arches, monumental columns, elaborate stained-glass panels, and neo-Gothic spires, stood in sharp contrast to the white clapboard meetinghouses on New England town squares. Junius turned in the 1840s from his father’s ascetic Congregationalism and his father-in-law’s strenuous Unitarianism to the liturgical, ritualized worship of the Episcopal Church. By 1853 the affiliation of Episcopalianism with wealth and social prestige was so pronounced that its clergymen worried about presiding over a “church … only for the rich.”
Pierpont Morgan was growing into a serious, good-looking boy with his father’s dark brown hair, hazel eyes, and confident gaze. Ill health continued to trouble him—he came down with “lung fever” in the winter of 1841, and scarlet fever six months later—but he managed to do physical chores alongside Joseph in Hartford and to pay long visits to John Pierpont in Troy as soon as he was old enough to travel alone. His mother gave birth to a second girl, Mary Lyman, in 1844, and two years later to another boy, Junius Spencer, Jr. That fall Pierpont, age nine, went away to school at the Episcopal Academy in Cheshire, between Hartford and New Haven. He came home three months later because his Morgan grandfather was ill.
